Yesterday was a great day of staying home and doing lots of homey type things right here.  I’d finished the magazine early on and then spent the day wandering around the yard with the kitties, transplanting loquat seedlings, and lounging around on the back porch.  I made a couple of soups throughout the day, my Asian spiced shrimp asparagus soup, and later a tomato, onion, corn and green bean chowder.  I like making mini-soups, enough for one serving at a time.  Soup is so fun to make, and I like to do it often.  I make just a pint or quart at a time and I eat it out of big oriental bowls, with bean sprouts and basil, using chopsticks.  By the end of the day, I was very relaxed, with very few thoughts going on in my head.  I love when that happens. Especially when I wake up and my thoughts are only about how comfy the bed is and how nice and warm it is under the covers, rather than waking up with my To Do List running a million miles an hour in my head.

I usually have an ongoing inner dialogue that is not too invasive.  Meditating twice a day, bringing my thoughts back to square one twice a day, helps with that. My thoughts may dwindle from:

The ongoing To Do List, as well as what is happening in the Now.
What I am doing in the Now, the To Do List has fallen away.
Doing without thinking, with my mantra running in the background of its own accord.
Doing without thinking, just observing, the mantra has fallen away.
Being without doing.

Last night I got comfortable in the big puffy chair and pulled the acrylic moon and stars blanket over my legs, so it would be nearby if I fell asleep and got chilly.  I like to keep the windows open when it’s chilly outside, I like it about 60 in the house. I was debating putting a warm cap on when YinYang jumped onto the headrest of the chair and stretched out, sealing in the heat from my head.  Perfect timing.  Not long after, Izzy jumped up on the footrest and made a bed on my legs.  Nice and warm, all of us in the big puffy chair.

Which was fine until I had to get up to powder my nose, seeing as I’d been drinking big watery soups all day.  I was careful to untangle Izzy from my legs, leaving him on the fuzzy star blanket.  I was careful not to send YinYang flying off the headrest as I got up.  It was an interesting yoga getting out of the chair that way. Afterward, I saw how little space there was in the chair for me with the two of them pinning me in, and I decided to go to bed rather than get back in the chair. It was 3:00am after all.  I still had no internal thoughts running, which was very cool.

I picked up Izzy in the fuzzy blanket and carried him into my room with me.  It was nice and freezie in there, and I knew I would warm up under the covers soon enough. Izzy is not a snuggle bed kitty and has only slept in my bed half a dozen times in 9 years.  But he stayed until I was almost asleep, when I felt him jump down.  My mind was still blissfully quiet, except for noticing my thoughts were still.

Sometime later, I woke up and felt Izzy back in the bed, lying on the covers on top of my legs.  I moved around, but couldn’t move much because he was right on top of me.  I’m a side sleeper, so during the night I’ll wake for a moment and roll to the other side. A big giant kitty on my legs kept me trapped on one side. But I didn’t want to disturb him, so I stayed on my right side and fell back asleep.  A while later, I woke and again tried to turn over, but he had me trapped.  It felt nice and warm under the covers, though, so I just ignored it, stayed trapped and went back to sleep.  Still no internal thoughts.  Nice.

The next time I woke up, I’d had enough of feeling trapped and not being able to turn over, so I reached down to move Izzy off my legs.  He wasn’t there.  I felt all around the bed in the dark.  Nowhere to be found.  I’d tangled myself up in my own bedding and here I had been blaming Izzy for it for hours!  He wasn’t keeping me trapped at all.  I remembered him trapping my legs as we sat in the big puffy chair earlier, and my thoughts automatically went to “he’s doing it again.”  I built this entire scenario in my head about what was happening, kind of like the time I was talking to my ShaktiCat.

But the scenario wasn’t real, it was all made up in my mind.  I’d simply let myself get tangled up in my own self and was reacting as though it was real. Like this video of a dog whose own leg is trying to steal his bone from him, so he attacks it .

We’ve all done that.  Had an idle thought that we began thinking was real.  We act as though it’s real and react to it as though it’s real, and we get all tangled up in it. Then we get comfortable in these tangled places and we keep ourselves trapped in scenarios that exist only in our minds.  We fear that someone is going to rob us of what is rightfully ours, but it’s our own leg we fear.

We have created an idea in our mind that something is separate from us and that we have to be on guard against it.

Then later we we wake up and untangle ourselves after we’ve had enough of biting our own leg one too many times.

I’m about gnawed to the bone before I figure it out sometimes.

How about you?